The Uncontested Life Is Not Worth Living

I’m finally starting to see other TAers on the trail! So far all of them have slowed a little to chat before blowing right past me. As well they should, if they want to reach Bluff within the unofficial 30-day time limit that makes you “count” as having finished. To do that, they need to average 100 km a day; my average is 60.

If this were a competition, I would look at their lighter loads and figure out what I need to cut. (Most are equipped for touring, not bikepacking—i.e. hotels, not tents. Not one of them has a ukulele.) If it were a serious competition, I’d have trained for it. But doing that would miss the entire point of riding the TA.

Plan A for this trip was to buy a campervan, then sell it when I left. Had I done that, the point of coming down here would have been to see New Zealand. Then I struck upon Plan B: Booster. With her, the point of this adventure is to find my limits and blow right past them. So if I’d trained adequately for the TA, I couldn’t ride it. I would have to find something harder.

This has been plenty hard. I’ve crossed the three week mark and the 1,200 km mark.(Only 1,800 to go!) I’m happy to say it took three weeks to find three hours where I didn’t enjoy the ride. Of my 1,200 km thus far, there’s a 40 km zig-zag of steep climbs and slippery switchbacks called the Kaiwhakauka-Mangapurua Trail. (If you can say that five times fast, you deserve a gold star.) It was on the Kaiwhakauka that I found the absolute upper limit of my ability.

The Kaiwhakauka is, shockingly, the less perilous half. The Department of Conservation has closed the Mangapurua section. Too dangerous, too many washouts. They’re both grade 4 MTB tracks, and as you may remember, the grade 3 Timber Trail threw me from the saddle twice. I wrote in my journal afterward “Do not even attempt grade 4.” But the only alternative is just as death-defying: 55 km on a busy highway with no shoulder. I figured at least I could hike-a-bike the Kaiwhakauka.

Right at the beginning there’s a stretch of 11 km—six miles—that’s as hard as anything I rode in Tasmania. It took me three hours to hike-a-bike that six miles.

Usually when you hike-a-bike you and your steed are walking abreast, but most of this trail is too narrow for that. Instead I’m directly behind her, my right arm at maximum extension so I can use her rear brake to keep her from rolling back down on me. Here’s an example of why: a patch of trail so washed out it’s not even as wide as my handlebars.

When I took this photo, I had no idea this would be one of the wider portions of those first six miles. I also hadn’t foreseen a twenty-foot stretch so daunting it would take five minutes to cross. Sorry, no picture for you there. Photos don’t convey steepness at all. I’ll sum it up this way: imagine trying to put your bike on top of a picnic table but you have to do it while sitting on the ground.

A big part of the trouble was that it rained all evening the day before. My trusty guidebook specifically says the first 11 km are especially dangerous after a heavy rain. Nice for rainbows but it turns that track into a Slip N Slide.

In fact, the guidebook undersells it. When you reach this particular 11 km stretch, you get new warning labels. In 2020, the last time they ran the TA as an official race, three riders got helicoptered off the mountain with broken bones. In 2019, more helicopters, more broken bones, and one fatality. Hence “Do not even attempt grade 4.”

Fast-forward to me, Booster, and the mud-slicked, picnic-table-sized boulder smack in the middle of the trail. We can’t go side by side. The trail is too narrow for that. And I can’t push her any higher because there’s not a single decent foothold to be found.

This twenty feet was so slick and so steep that if I’d brought a longer rope, I would have rigged a pulley to hoist Booster up. But my rope is just for hanging clothes and tying tourniquets, so no work-smarter-not-harder for me. In the end I pushed her straight up the mountain, where at least we could gain some purchase on the underbrush.

The Kaiwhakauka beat me. The only way to press on was to abandon it. Maybe that was working smarter, not harder, but it was still pretty fucking hard.

And that gets me back to the earlier point: why my training rides were for perfecting Booster’s gear load-out, not conditioning my legs and lungs to average 100 km a day. The reason I came down here was not to live up to my potential. It was to increase the upper limit of that potential. Better cardio can’t do that. The mud-slicked boulder did that. That whole miserable six-mile stretch did that. Three hours, half of it spent resting, marshaling energy for the next push. When I finally got past it, I unfurled my tent’s groundsheet and slept.

Yes, I know, Worst Bikepacker here. I suck at this. If I were good at it, this would be a vacation, not an adventure. The only thing I can really say for myself is I’m getting better. A little. Back in Tasmania, on the Wellington range, I didn’t quit early enough. That’s why I needed police helicopters. This time I did quit, at least long enough to catch a nap before attempting the next 30 km of trail. And look ma, no helicopters! So yeah, Worst Bikepacker in New Zealand, but a little better than I was before.